The Nancy Book

Book excerpt: From 1963 to 1978 Joe Brainard (author of I REMEMBER) created more than 100 works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified by the incongruity of her presence. Whether inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures, or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, and Willem de Kooning, Brainard's Nancy revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality. Together these works accumulate into a sophisticated, complex work of great wit, equal parts surprise and subtlety.The Nancy Book is the first published collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings (with nearly eighty full page reproductions), including collaborations with luminary New York School poets such as Frank O?Hara and Ted Berrigan, an essay by Ann Lauterbach that illuminates, with critical and poetic acumen, the complexity of Brainard's transformation of Nancy.OEvery page of this book will make you smile or laugh'not with recognition but with startled joy. Joe Brainard took an unchanging icon of the American norm and inserted her into countless fashionable or scandalous contexts, subtly metamorphosing something that seemed eternal into absurdly contemporary forms. He is as funny as only a philosopher can be.O Edmund White.OJoe Brainard's pursuit of the once ubiquitous fuzzy-haired pest Nancy chronicled one of the great love-hate relationships in American popular culture. It's wonderful to have it all between the covers of a book.O John Ashbery